Wind turbines are the fastest growing energy source in the US and as wind farms spread across the landscape there have been worries that they’ll affect the value of nearby homes. No need to worry say researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

That’s good news since wind turbines are sprouting up like dandelions. More wind power was installed in 2012 — about 13 gigawatts — than new coal-fired or gas-fired electricity generation. The US is on a pace to install 2,750 turbines a year, according to the Lawrence Berkeley study.

So what happens when a wind farm pops up next door?

The researchers collected data from more than 50,000 home sales in 27 counties in nine states — Washington, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey.

These homes were within 10 miles of 67 different wind facilities, and 1,198 sales were within 1 mile of a turbine The data spanned the periods well before announcement of the wind facilities to well after their construction.

A rigorous statistical analysis turned up no significant impact on home values and it wasn’t as if the researchers didn’t look.Read more…

While that might seem confounding it all has to do with the type and price of energy used in Colorado, according to an analysis by the federal Energy Information Administration based on its 2009 Residential Energy Consumption Survey

Colorado households consume 103 million British thermal units of energy a year. (A Btu is the amount of energy it takes to heat one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.) The bill: a little more than $1,500 a year.

“Since the weather in Colorado is cooler than other areas of the United States, space heating accounts for more than half of household energy use,” the analysis says.Read more…

Colorado remained fifth in the nation for photovoltaic installations, as the number of megawatts installed jumped 69 percent to 91 megawatts in 2011 compared with 2010, according to a study released today.

It was a “historic” year with solar installations more than doubling to 1,885 megawatts, the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research said in their market review.

The analysis forecasts the U.S. market share, which grew from 5 percent to 7 percent in 2011, to increase steadily reaching nearly 15 percent in 2016.

California, with 542 megawatts of new PV installations and New Jersey with 313 megawatts reamined number 1 and 2 repectively with each state more than doubling installations over 2010.

Arizona, 273 megawatts, and New Mexico, 116 megawatts, were numbers 3 and 4.

There are now 3,954 megawatts of PV capacity operating in the U.S. with more than 214,000 individual systems, according to the market analysis.

The weighted average cost of installed systems, dropped 20 percent over the course of the year as result of lower component prices, improved installation efficiency and a shift toward larger systems, the study said.

Solar photovoltaic panel installations hit a national record 449 megawatts in the third quarter of 2011 – a 140 percent jump form the same quarter in 2010, according to a study by GMT Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Almost 60 percent of the installations were in California and New Jersey – which have been the perennial leaders in solar installations. Colorado was seventh, down a notch when compare with the third quarter of 2010.

Here are the rankings for 3Q 2011, with last year’s place in parenthese

The overall cost of installed solar arrays (residential, commercial, utility-scale) fell 14.4 percent between the second and third quarters of 2011 to $4.45/W. That was driven by a drop in the price of utility-scale installations.

Residential system prices dropped 2.7 percent with the national average installed price decreasing from $6.41/W to $6.24/W. That was primarily due to price declines in major markets — including California, Colorado, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In those markets, some system were being installed for less than $5.00/W, according to the report.

Emilie Rusch covers retail and commercial real estate for The Post. A Wisconsin native and Mizzou graduate, she moved to Colorado in 2012. Before that, she worked at a small daily newspaper in South Dakota. It's the one with Mount Rushmore.